Charlene Scoggin bought her home in Boulder's University Heights neighborhood in 1965.

Over the last 50 years, she's heard crowds roar for Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, The Who, Van Halen and other legendary rock 'n' roll acts that came through Boulder to play at Folsom Field.

Now, after a 15-year hiatus, concerts are coming back to the University of Colorado's football stadium, as three of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead team up with John Mayer for performances on July 2 and 3. Dead & Company, as the band's been christened, is expected to draw up to 60,000 people over the two nights.

John Mayer, left, and Bob Weir of Dead & Company perform at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., on June 12. The band will perform at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field on Saturday and July 3. (Amy Harris / Associated Press)

Rock concerts were a summer staple at Folsom Field in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, but only have been staged a handful of times since — largely because they sometimes drew raucous fans who used nearby lawns as restrooms, drank too much, took too many drugs and caused massive traffic jams in the city.

"I got up about 4 o'clock in the morning with one concert," Scoggin, 96, recalled recently. "People were calling back and forth to one another and shooting off firecrackers, so there was no sleeping. I looked across the street over at (my neighbor's) house, and, in the front yard, there was this fellow, he was stark naked, and he was showering himself down with the garden hose."

But CU, which went to great lengths in 1986 to curb future concerts at Folsom, says those are problems of the past, and has worked this spring to reassure the university's neighbors. It's a familiar refrain for the campus, which made such promises following a string of rowdy shows in the '70s and '80s.

Still, Scoggin isn't rejoicing at the thought of live music returning to Folsom Field.

"I wish the university had other means of enriching their coffers, that they didn't have to resort to this for money," she said.

Van Halen's 1986 show at Folsom Field was so loud and fans got so out of hand that, afterward, CU's Board of Regents passed a resolution effectively banning concerts at the stadium.

In the decades since, the stadium has hosted just three rock shows.

The regents' resolution, which passed 8-1 on Sept. 18, 1986, required rock concerts to be held indoors whenever possible. It also banned general admission tickets and implemented a 7 p.m. cut-off time for concerts, which were required to last less than five hours.

Even that was a compromise, as some regents suggested harsher restrictions, such as an outright ban on all outdoor rock shows on campus.

Coming Friday

Look for an interview with Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge in this week's Friday Magazine. We'll also talk with fans traveling from out of state to Boulder for the Folsom Field shows and give a run-down of local events being planned in connection with Dead & Company's visit.

"Rock concerts are totally inconsistent with the objective of this university and we should not be wasting time on (this topic)," Regent Hugh Fowler, a Republican from Longmont who served on the board from 1982 to 1988, said at the time.

Thirty years later, university officials say much has changed.

They're hoping that neighborhood outreach, proactive policing and security, campus and city camping bans, and protocols to prevent underage drinking and overconsumption lead to successful concerts. If the Dead & Company concerts go well, shows at Folsom Field are likely to become regular occurrences, just as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

The university expects between 25,000 and 35,000 people — who paid between $39.50 and $119.50 per ticket — to attend each concert, including 7,500 people with tickets to sit on the field itself.

"It is our sincere hope and plan that through community collaboration and careful event planning, the Dead & Company concerts will be good for the university and the city, enjoyable for attendees and minimally disruptive to our neighbors," CU Athletic Director Rick George said in a news release.

Dead & Company's crew will arrive Sunday with 11 truckloads of equipment to start transforming a football field into a concert venue. The stage will be located in the north end zone and will extend to the 15-yard line. Crews will protect the grass with a breathable plastic covering.

All told, some 200 workers will help transform Folsom over five days.

Concerts through the ages

Over the course of JC Ancell's 34-year career at CU's University Memorial Center, which began when he was still a student at Boulder High in the late 1960s, he helped organize more than 25 stadium shows.

Working with Denver-area promoters, the CU student group Program Council brought dozens of big-name artists to Folsom Field — the university administration had a mostly hands-off approach at first, Ancell recalled this month from his home in Longmont.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the concerts regularly resulted in arrests, often for drug sales and usage; trips to the hospital for hundreds of fans who drank too much, overheated or both; snarled traffic; and noise complaints from neighbors and city officials, according to Ancell and extensive coverage in the Daily Camera archives.

After particularly troublesome concerts, Folsom would go dormant for a while, hosting only home football games and other events.

But the concerts would inevitably return. Each time, the Camera wrote a story citing Program Council leaders and other campus officials who promised that the next concert wouldn't be as bad as the last.

When Program Council hosted the Grateful Dead at Folsom in 1972, the athletic department wouldn't make the stadium's restrooms available, which led concertgoers to relieve themselves elsewhere, Ancell said.

"People would naturally go into whatever bush was available and that drew complaints from the neighborhood," he said.

Members of CU's athletic department weren't big fans of the stadium shows, especially after a 1975 Doobie Brothers concert ruined the field's turf.

But by the mid-1970s, the athletic department wanted in on the action. Program Council worked out a deal to give athletics 50 cents from each ticket sold, an amount that increased in later years.

In 1977, CU hosted Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, John Sebastian and Firefall in a concert that drew a record 61,500 fans to Folsom.

That may have been a few too many people, Ancell admitted.

"It was a hard way to find out the real practical capacity (of Folsom) was about 50,000 people," he said.

ABC News report on one of the Grateful Dead's 15th anniversary concerts at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field on June 7, 1980.

When The Rolling Stones played Folsom in 1978, they violated the city's noise ordinance, which resulted in five citations. Ultimately, the city deferred prosecuting Feyline Presents for one year, during which time the promoter agreed not to violate the noise ordinance again.

When the Stones played Folsom again in 1981, fans left 60 tons of garbage in and around the stadium and police seized $11,282 in drugs.

An REO Speedwagon and Cheap Trick show in 1979 drew a rough crowd that, at times, became violent.

"Some of us at the university were a little bit uncomfortable," Ancell said. "Now, we're getting kind of a harder rock show, a little different demographic instead of sunshine and Beach Boys and fading flower children. It was at that show that, for the first time, we were seeing a drunker crowd, a tendency toward violence, and we were kinda going, 'Wow, we need to pay more attention to the bands we're bringing.'"

The Grateful Dead returned to Folsom in 1980 for two early July shows, almost 36 years to the day of this year's Dead & Company concerts. The band created unique challenges for Program Council and Boulder as a community.

"The Grateful Dead bring campers and they bring people who show up early and spend the summer in Boulder," Ancell said.

That was hard to manage in Boulder County, which lacked — and still lacks — much space for camping.

In fact, Grateful Dead fans' penchant for camping led the university to kill a planned 1990 show at Folsom Field because it couldn't find adequate campground space for the thousands of fans expected to follow the Dead to Boulder.

Ted Nugent played Folsom in 1982 and brought with him the same rough-and-tumble crowd that came to see REO Speedwagon and Cheap Trick three years earlier, Ancell said.

"Ted Nugent was absolutely defiant about our attempts to keep the noise down, and so you have bands that were not really aligned with the idea of, 'Hey, we're a stadium that's in a community and we're trying to keep things friendly,'" Ancell said. "We had noise complaints by the ton. And we had really a lot of alcohol-related problems with the crowd."

Paul Theel, left, and Bret Ryckman display a Van Halen banner on the University of Colorado campus ahead of that band's notorious July 12, 1986, concert at Folsom Field. (Daily Camera file photo)

Van Halen: 'Worst it has ever been'

Though tensions had been simmering between the students of Program Council and CU administrators, it was the 1986 show by hard-rockers Van Halen that got the Board of Regents involved.

The problems started early.

Program Council and promoter Feyline Presents scheduled Van Halen to play on the opening night of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," an outdoor performance put on by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival at CU's Mary Rippon Theatre.

Then-artistic director Dan Yang tried to block the concert, taking his concerns to the university's leadership. Eventually, though, Yang gave up and opted to reschedule the Shakespeare performance rather than compete with tens of thousands of fans and a noisy rock concert a few blocks away.

Program Council paid the festival $15,000 and promised it would never happen again, according to the Camera's archives. CU officials would make the same scheduling mistake 30 years later.

On the day of the show in mid-July, Van Halen showed up late to conduct its soundcheck. Outside Folsom, fans started getting antsy.

People began forming a line outside the stadium around 7:30 a.m., Ancell said. Program Council had planned to open up the doors, let fans in and confiscate as much liquor as possible at 8:30 a.m.

With only a handful of portable toilets outside the stadium, concertgoers again traipsed into nearby neighborhoods to relieve themselves.

Instead of getting their liquor confiscated at the door, they were chugging it outside. Officials had to close Folsom Street, which had not been part of the plan. Ancell's phone and police dispatch lines were inundated with complaints.

"It was like a flashback to the Grateful Dead (in 1972) — only times 10," Ancell said. "There were people drinking, getting rowdy. It was really a big mess."

Police arrested 36 people at the concert, including five for drug sales. Others were arrested for disorderly conduct, third-degree assault for resisting arrest and drug possession. The Boulder County Jail swelled to overflowing.

Medical staffers reported treating 300 people during the show, mostly for overconsumption of alcohol.

"This is the worst it has ever been," neighbor Tony Lavendar told a Camera reporter that night.

The sound level from the Van Halen show was measured at the city's maximum as far away as Table Mesa Drive and Broadway — nearly 3.5 miles from the stadium.

"It got so loud, we couldn't hear the phone (when people called to complain)," Ancell told the Camera in August 1989.

Van Halen fans fill the University of Colorado's Folsom Field for the band's infamous July 12, 1986, concert. (Daily Camera file photo)

'An absolute disaster'

Members of the Board of Regents were "outraged," Ancell said.

Republican Peter Dietze, who held an at-large seat on the board, described the Van Halen show as "an absolute disaster" that caused "unbelievable problems" for the university and the community, according to minutes from the board's Aug. 14, 1986, meeting.

"What happened was not an isolated incident, but the worst of several incidences, which we cannot afford to allow to be repeated," Dietze told the board.

Regent David Sutherland said it was time to accept that the character of the concerts didn't match up with university or surrounding communities. He chided campus administrators for defending an "extended, intensified drug and alcohol party."

Regent Fowler wanted to ban the concerts altogether.

"Rock concerts and that type of activity obviously encourages the use of drugs on our campus," he told the board. "That's unacceptable."

In the end, after discussing the concerts at two meetings and hearing from student government leaders, university administrators and Ancell, the regents passed a resolution that restricted the concerts, but did not get rid of them entirely.

In the 30 years that followed, just three acts played Folsom: The Who in 1989, Paul McCartney in 1993 and Dave Matthews Band in 2001.

The campus also has staged other outdoor concerts since the 1986 Van Halen show, including the annual Welcome Fest concerts on Farrand Field each August.

Ancell, who retired from his post as associate director of the University Memorial Center in 2002, said Dave Matthews Band was his last attempt to revive the once-rocking stadium shows at CU.

That concert caused horrible traffic snarls, he recalled. Heavy rains also delayed the show, which caused the band to go 15 minutes past its 10:30 p.m. curfew, set by the CU administration.

The band apparently didn't mind paying Program Council $15,000 after the show — $1,000 for each minute it played past curfew. Police kicked 25 people out of the stadium.

With Ancell gone, the push for concerts at Folsom appeared to die.

Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones perform at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field on July 16, 1978. (Daily Camera file photo)

'No concrete answer'

Until Lance Carl arrived.

In 2013, Carl returned to CU as associate athletic director for business development. He'd been a star receiver for the Buffs during the mid-1980s, best known for catching a 52-yard touchdown pass that led CU to a 20-10 victory over Nebraska, CU's chief rival, in 1986.

Carl said he couldn't understand why Folsom Field hadn't been used as a concert venue since the Dave Matthews Band performance.

"A lot of people asked, 'Well, why haven't we had a concert here in 15 years?' and that was my question, too, when I came back," Carl said. "You get a lot of varying opinions. It's too noisy or the neighborhood was complaining. But there was really no concrete answer."

According to Carl, the first question Strasburg had was: Is Chancellor Phil DiStefano on board?

The chancellor OK'ed the shows and told Carl to consult with CU Police Chief Melissa Zak about an 11 p.m. concert cut-off time. Zak said that was fine.

In an interview with the Camera this spring, Carl said he'd never heard of the CU Board of Regents' resolution governing concerts at Folsom Field, though he did get the chancellor's blessing for the shows.

The 1986 resolution gave the chancellor the power to make exceptions to the regents' rules.

And, in the 1990s, the regents updated their laws and policies to delegate more day-to-day authority to campus chancellors, said Patrick O'Rourke, CU's chief legal officer and secretary to the Board of Regents.

Today, O'Rourke said, it's much less likely that the regents would get involved in something like a stadium show (though not out of the question), as they're more focused on big-picture issues and strategic objectives.

Dave Matthews Band performs at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field on July 11, 2001. The Dead & Company concerts next weekend will be the first at CU's football stadium since Matthews' performance. (Daily Camera file photo)

Community support

Carl has been doing his best to make the first concerts at Folsom Field in 15 years go smoothly, including holding a meeting with University Heights neighbors in April.

He said he wanted them to be able to put a face and a name with the athletic department. He gave them his business card and told them to call him directly if anything goes wrong the night of the shows.

"What can we do to ensure their safety and make them feel secure for those 48 hours that we're there?" he said.

The athletic department will provide 24-hour security for the neighborhood Friday night through Sunday night, and gave about 50 free concert tickets to neighbors as a goodwill gesture.

There will be some system in place to ensure that only University Heights residents and their guests are allowed to park in the neighborhood, officials said.

"This is a partnership and we can't succeed without the community's understanding and support," campus spokesman Ryan Huff said. "That's really important to the university."

In the minds of some Folsom Field neighbors, the concerts are similar to home football games and other massive events held there, like the Bolder Boulder.

Jack Landbloom, who owns the University Heights Apartments buildings at 1310 Folsom St., 1320 Folsom St. and 2425 University Heights Ave., said he's not concerned about the Dead & Company shows at all.

"Our experience with events there have been football games and the Bolder Boulder and that kind of thing," he said. "We've had nothing but good experiences with those events, so I'm optimistic that the concerts will be similar."

Dianne Hackett, who has lived at 2782 Bella Vista Lane for 52 years, said she's glad to see people having fun at football games, rock concerts, fireworks shows and all of the many other events hosted by the university.

"The impacts on the neighborhood is mostly really not bad," Hackett said. "We happily put up with them because we love living here and that's one of the things that happens when you live in this neighborhood."

She said the events at the university help make Boulder "such a wonderful vibrant place."

The Folsom Music Festival on May 1, 1977, which featured Fleetwood Mac, Bob Segar, John Sebastian and Firefall, drew a record crowd of 61,500 to the University of Colorado's Folsom Field. (Courtesy Lobeline Communications)

A different business

Carl repeated the error made ahead of the 1986 Van Halen show when he scheduled the two Dead & Company concerts at the same time as three Colorado Shakespeare Festival performances.

The Shakespeare festival canceled the performances that overlapped with the concerts, and the athletic department agreed to pay the festival $100,000 — or the equivalent of sell-out ticket sales for all three shows and some lost concession and gift shop sales.

Tim Orr, executive director for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, said the issue was worked out in less than 20 minutes. He doesn't fault the athletic department.

"It's a big campus," Orr said. "Frankly, I don't really know what's going on with football game schedules or basketball games. Eh, mistakes happen. As long as we fix them, everything's fine."

Echoing what campus officials said 30 years ago, a campus spokesman said the overlap between stadium shows and Shakespeare won't happen again.

"That was an unfortunate oversight," Huff said.

Repeated Shakespeare blunder aside, Huff pointed out that the concert business is much different today than it was three decades ago.

Now, venues have enhanced security, plenty of restrooms and better event-management protocols. The campus reached out to neighbors beforehand to try to address their concerns proactively, he said.

Officials are encouraging ticketholders to take alternate forms of transportation to the stadium to cut down on potential traffic jams.

In the 1970s and 1980s, fans used to line up outside the University Memorial Center — some even camped out — to buy tickets for Folsom shows. All ticket sales today are done electronically, mostly online.

The university will set up a to-be-announced complaint hotline for the duration of the concerts and has the ability to tell the sound engineer to turn down the volume if it's too loud outside the stadium, officials said.

There will be strong protocols in place during the concerts to prevent underage drinking and overconsumption, officials said.

Ancell, who said he was consulted by the university after it announced the Dead & Company shows, said he believes the athletic department is making a good-faith effort to mitigate any problems that may arise before, during and after the concerts.

"I don't think they're going in there with a Pollyanna point of view," Ancell said.

Huff, the campus spokesman, said this first round of concerts in 15 years will certainly be a learning experience for CU. Campus officials hope to have one or two concerts at Folsom in 2017 in the weeks between the Bolder Boulder and the end of July.

"This is indeed a test," he said. "We anticipate two successful nights of concerts, but we envision that there will be some lessons learned to apply to future concerts."

The Grateful Dead celebrated their 15th anniversary with two concerts at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field on June 7 and 8, 1980. Three of the surviving members of the Dead will return to Folsom next weekend for two concerts with Dead & Company, their new band with guitarist John Mayer. (Daily Camera file photo)

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